Forum Discussion
Disable users ability to create rules...
VasilMichev Thank you, I don't think that would help. The purpose is to stop any malicious people who have stolen credentials from creating rules. They would be accessing it from outside our domain.
Rules to do what? auto-Forward emails? You can easily prevent that in better ways. Otherwise, I'm not sure what rules you are concerned about.
- Hi Andy, Can you please help me with the ways to prevent users to create rules to forward the emails.
Andy David Typically once a users credentials are stolen, the malicious individual creates a rule to move all (or sometimes specific) emails to a specified folder, that the actual user would never typically check. That way the user is unaware of any suspicious activity until it is usually too late.
We have implemented multi-factor authentication, which should make it much more difficult for this to occur. But as an added security the partners of my company would like to block the creation of any rules.
Also, rules to move emails do not fall under the forwarding/redirect rules. So the option to prevent that does not apply sadly...
Well, to be honest, I think this is an unnecessary concern - esp with the implementation of MFA.
If you were to block the ability to create rules, that would hamper your user's from being able to manage their mailboxes effectively and, as in all these things, security has to be balanced with practicality . I'm still not seeing what real harm is being done to a mailbox if a bad actor moved a message to another folder.
Andy David Well in this case the bad actor, we will call him Jimmy, intercepted an email about a incoming wire from a client to our company of a VERY large amount, using stolen credentials. Jimmy convinced the client to send the money to another bank account, telling them our original account was compromised. The client, thinking that the contact was still the proper person in our company, complied and sent them the money.
Jimmy was smart enough to set up a rule for all incoming and sent emails to and from the clients domain to be moved to the RSS feeds folder, which no one on God's green earth uses, so that the real employee, whose credentials were stolen, within our company would never see them.
A lot of things were done wrong by the client, there were quite a few red flags and they never called to confirm with us. We also should have had better security long ago. But one of the measures the company partners would like to make to help ensure this never happens again, is to stop all rules from being created. Or at the very least some form of alert whenever one is created. This is not a terrible request as it is a VERY common way the Jimmies of the world operate.
You may think it unnecessary, but if you lost this amount of money maybe you would change your mind?
It may be extreme, but thankfully almost no one in our company uses rules. And it will put the minds of our accounting folks and partners at rest.
Thanks for your input!
